What had taken George’s eye was that splendidly defined fullstop. With the morning light slanting in here, and showing up every mote of dust and grain of wood-powder, the individual nodules of that fingertip showed even to the naked eye. Almost certainly the right fore-finger, unless Gerry Boden happened to be a southpaw. And he had impressed that print with careful precision—he or whoever it was. It wouldn’t take Sergeant Noble very long to find out.
‘Do any of the others ever come here?’ George asked. ‘Legitimately?’
‘Could happen,’ allowed Orrie indifferently, and shrugged. ‘Not often. Not lately. What for?’
‘Good! Then stay away from here today. Can you do that? If there’s anything you want, take it now.’
‘There’s nothing I want,’ said Orrie. ‘It’s all yours.’
George made two or three telephone calls from the nearest box, handed over the minute inspection of Orlando Benyon’s shed to the appropriate people, made contact with the police pathologist and his own chief at C.I.D. headquarters, left strict instructions about what news and reports should be channelled to his home number immediately, and what could wait, and drove with the exaggerated care and deliberation of sleeplessness back towards the village of Comerford, uncomfortably in transition to a suburban area, where he, and the unhappy parents of the boy Boden, lived within three doors of each other. One more hurdle, the highest, and then he could sleep. Whether the Bodens would be able to sleep was another matter. With sedatives, maybe. But not everyone responds to sedatives. Some people feel them as a kind of outrage and violation, and Boden was a strong-minded and passionate man. George was not looking forward to that interview. On the other hand, he would not for any money have delegated it to anyone else.
‘I hope you didn’t mind,’ said Lesley Paviour blithely, swinging the wheel of the old Morris nonchalantly as they negotiated the sharp turn by the downstream bend of the Comer, not very far from where Gerry Boden’s body had been towed ashore. ‘I had to get away from there for a few hours. Normally I can ride it. I mean, for God’s sake, I took it on, didn’t I? I don’t welch on my bargains, I really don’t! But under pressure, I tell you, it gets tight. But
‘Not in the least. You drive well.’ And so she did, with verve and judgment, and certainly with decision. She smiled with quick pleasure at being praised.
‘If I had your friend’s Aston Martin, now, instead of this old thing!’
Charlotte declined to rise to this fly. They had seen nothing of Gus since he had withdrawn, she suspected with reluctance, after delivering her and her luggage at Paviour’s house. He had strung out the conversation, after the chief inspector’s departure, or made an attempt to, but without much backing from anyone else, and failing to get any invitation to remain, had finally taken himself off.
‘He seems to be a gentleman of leisure, that young man,’ Lesley continued thoughtfully. ‘Whatever can he do for a living, if he’s free to ramble about in the middle of the working week in April? Have you known him long?’
‘I don’t know him at all, really,’ said Charlotte. ‘We only met walking round Aurae Phiala yesterday, and then found we were both staying at the same pub. I gathered he’s some sort of adviser on Roman antiques—I’m a little vague about details. Maybe to museums? Or collectors.’ Those things she knew about Gus Hambro which did not fit into this picture, such as his manipulations over the room at the inn, she did not care to mention to anyone until she herself understood them better. ‘He seems to know his subject,’ she said. ‘At least,
‘In spite of having Alan Morris in the family,’ Lesley said, and smiled as she drew into the left traffic lane at the lights on the outskirts of Comerbourne. ‘Have you really never met him? Oh, you must! You don’t know what you’ve been missing.’
‘Nobody’s finding it very easy to meet him at the moment,’ said Charlotte. ‘He seems to have gone off into the wilds of Turkey on some dig or other, and got so interested that he forgot to come back. Nobody’s heard from him for more than a year. As a matter of fact, his solicitor is getting a bit worried about his silence.’ She did not care to make the point any more strongly, or to admit any anxiety on her own part, not even to this impulsively talkative companion whose goodwill and sympathy were already taken for granted. ‘Tell me about him,’ she said. ‘What is he really like?’
Lesley turned smartly left as the lights changed, and wound her way by back-streets to the parking-ground on the edge of the shopping centre, a multi-storey monstrosity of raw concrete, at which she gazed with resigned distaste as she crept slowly up to the barrier and drove in to the second tier. ‘Brutal, isn’t it? In a nice Tudor-cum- Georgian town like this, I ask you! Doctor Morris? Well, I suppose I do know him fairly well, he’s stayed with us a couple of times. But of course Stephen knows him much better, he was at college with him, and they’ve always kept in touch, in a fairly loose sort of way. Don’t think I’m being bitchy if I say that Stephen probably resents him as much as he admires him. They began more or less level, you see, and then the one went on forging right to the top, and the other came labouring along always further and further in the rear. They never were less than friends, though, so admiration must have kept on winning out.’
The car slid neatly into its slot, and she cut the engine and opened her door. ‘Grab the shopping bag, would you mind?—it’s slid over your side. Let’s go and have coffee first, and then I’ve got to call at the bank to get some cash, and dump that package, before we start shopping.’
Charlotte lifted out a large bag of pale, soft leather, so limp as to seem empty, and lifted her eyebrows in surprise at the weight of the small, brown-paper-wrapped box that dragged down one corner of it. And Lesley laughed.
‘Yes, that’s why I want to get rid of it first. It’s something of Orrie’s, actually. Country people are odd! He claims he doesn’t trust banks, he refuses to open an account, yet he doesn’t see anything illogical in asking me or Stephen to put things in our safe-deposit box to keep for him. He’s not so dumb, you know. Quite sharp enough to know all about dodging income tax on the odd jobs he does in his spare time. Cash payments and no account books! And every now and again he probably gets a shade nervous at keeping cash under the floor-boards or wherever he puts it, and starts spreading the load.’
Now that she was away from Aurae Phiala, Leslev had flamed into an almost delirious fluency and radiance, she who was bright enough to dazzle even in her chosen prison. She talked incessantly and joyously over coffee in the feminine precincts of the main dress shop: about Aurae Phiala itself, about Orrie, and the village community of Moulden, about Bill Lawrence and his aspirations. She rejoiced in being free from the place, but she talked of it with comprehension and critical affection. Perhaps she needed this interlude only as the lover needs a rest from loving.
‘Poor Bill, he has ambitions towards scholarship. I mean the real thing. I could be wrong, but I don’t think he
